361–370 of 404 posts
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I'm thinking 10mm^2 so kinda 3.3mm x 3.3mm. In 130nm (Remember 130nm gave us the late models Pentium 3s, the second model P4s and some Athlons, though all of these had a bigger die size) I'm thinking you could have some low power or very specific ICs, where these would shine as opposed to a generic FPGA solution
> 10mm^2 so kinda 3.3mm x 3.3mm 3.16mm x 3.16mm?
I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less - cooperation simply doesn't seem as fashionable. But the FOSS world gives me hope - it shows me a world where cooperation is encouraged, and works really, really well. Where the best available solution isn't just the one that was made by a…
I.e. a trade is when two parties engage in a mutually beneficial exchange.
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I think the principles underlying FOSS are found everywhere. It's just that the idea of 'markets' and 'transactions' being the ubiquitous thing has infected our thinking.
Wholeheartedly agree. In parts of society where our distorted ideas of "productivity" and "success" are absent, people share more freely. The island where my family is from comes to mind (Crete, Greece). There—in the rural areas—people were able to deal with the 2007-2008 crisis a lot more effectively than they did in the cities—esp. compared to Athens. What I observed is that if someone didn't have enough, the rest…
My advice to anyone who's looking for a pathway into open source silicon is to look into E-Beam lithography. Effectively E-Beam lithography involves using a scanning electron microscope to expose a resist on silicon. This process is normally considered to slow for industrial production but it's simplicity and size make it ideal for prototyping and photo mask production. The simplistic explanation for why this works i…
I suggest you take a look at how easy maskless photolithography is: https://sam/zeloof.xyz Theoretically it should be feasible to fab 350 nm without double-patterning by optimizing a simple immersion DLP/DMD i-line stepper. I think ArF immersion with double-patterning should be able to do maskless 90 nm.
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I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less - cooperation simply doesn't seem as fashionable. But the FOSS world gives me hope - it shows me a world where cooperation is encouraged, and works really, really well. Where the best available solution isn't just the one that was made by a…
Software can be duplicated for near zero marginal cost. It’s a well studied phenomenon in economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…
also have you seen what passes for software in the hardware world? i’m talking about EDA. i haven’t used cadence etc but altium is an trash fire and it’s $5k/seat. below that level the tools are even more atrocious. i’m mystified why someone doesn’t come in and disrupt that space.
It will require a team knowing professional software development and professional PCB design to disrupt it. When you get only one of those, you get the trash fire.
I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…
I've also worked on the hardware side a bit as well as in EDA (Electronic Design Automation)- the software used to design hardware. Since you already commented on the hardware side of things, I'll comment on the EDA side. The EDA industry is also very backwards and highly insular - it felt like an old boys club. When I worked in EDA in the late aughts we were still using a version of gcc from about 2000. They did not…
How is a 4 years old distribution "very ancient"? There's very likely plenty of Ubuntu 16.04 in the field, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
RedHat uses "old" kernels, if that's what you refer to with "ancient" but there are reasons for that, and they're also backported, they're not unupdated.
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I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the…
'Survival of the fittest' when applied to groups implies cooperation as an essential skill between individuals. It's not all competition. The fittest group is not the one made of the most individually fit members, they also need to function well together.
-David Sloan & E. O. Wilson
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Wholeheartedly agree. In parts of society where our distorted ideas of "productivity" and "success" are absent, people share more freely. The island where my family is from comes to mind (Crete, Greece). There—in the rural areas—people were able to deal with the 2007-2008 crisis a lot more effectively than they did in the cities—esp. compared to Athens. What I observed is that if someone didn't have enough, the rest…
IMO this has nothing at all to do with "distorted ideas of productivity and success" and everything to do with the rural vs urban lifestyle. There are plenty of similar examples like the one you gave that happen everyday here in the U.S. As a general human rule, smaller communities are more tightly knit and care more for each other.
What is present in rural areas is a sort of respect and fear of exclusion (I think these two are reciprocal). But it is not impossible to have that on a local level in a large city. Having lived in both London and New York (similar population size, vastly different population density) I've seen this happen. In Manhattan specifically there is little respect for neighborhoods—comparatively—while in London residents care for their boroughs. Some direct actions that might have fostered that are simple things like community gardens/allotments which are very common in the UK.
that's my humble opinion, I'm not an expert in human social behavior.
I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…
Imagine a combined Intel+AMD+Samsung+Nvidia behemoth pooling together their expertise. Internal competition would still exist, but for actual technical reasons now instead of market ones. One could imagine myriad ways to fund such a cooperative endeavour, which are never even tried because the current model is sacred.